Health care for veterans needs a dramatic overhaul

Since the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has seen a steady stream of service men and women returning home in need of health care, but problems in the Department of Veterans Affairs has made it difficult for these veterans to get the care they need.

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, more than 1.3 million veterans received specialized mental health treatment from VA for mental health-related issues. What the VA website fails to mention is the wait times veterans are given before they are able to get treatment.

A recent story to hit the news was that of Nicholas D’Amico, a missile-defense specialist who served in the Army for four years in South Korea and Saudi Arabia. D’Amico’s mother said her son was withdrawn, moody and had been diagnosed with major depression. D’Amico would have to wait six months before he received a teleconference with a psychiatrist in Albuquerque. D’Amico lived in El Paso. That includes five canceled appointments with psychiatrists at VA hospital in El Paso.

D’Amico committed suicide last September, two months before his scheduled teleconference appointment.

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated case. An internal investigation showed that the wait time for new mental health patients at VA hospitals averaged over a month. Not one of the 141 medical systems examined in the investigation met the goal of getting all new patients an appointment within 14 days. At 30 facilities, the average wait topped 40 days. The El Paso VA had some of the nation’s worst wait times with new patients waiting on average 60 days for an appointment and 16 days for follow-up care.

More soldiers are dying by taking their own lives than are dying in combat and this country is doing a poor job of righting this monstrous wrong.

It is patriotic to put bumper stickers on your car and have ticker-tape parades for the units stationed in and around your hometown’s return home, but not enough is being done to support the veterans in returning to a sense of normalcy. After all they have given to protect us, we should be willing to do the same for them when they need someone to fight for them.

This is not a time for partisan politics and the usual Democrat versus Republican mentality that is so often seen in our government, but unfortunately that it is what it will likely boil down to. Take a look back a few weeks ago when President Barack Obama spoke on the inefficiency in VA. There were no suggestions of solutions, only finger pointing.

Calls for the resignation of former VA Secretary Eric Shinseki came from both side of the aisles, but it was Republicans who blocked legislation last January in the Senate that would have expanded access to health care for veterans. It would have been an expensive venture to open 27 new medical facilities, but a cost that was well worth it.

It is time that we take a moment to take a stand for something that is much more important than what you think about the guy currently sitting in the Oval Office. To get the much needed help to those that cannot get it because of bureaucratic red tape or extremely long wait times. To get the much needed help to those who are deciding that it is not worth the wait.

Once you peel away all the layers of donkeys, elephants and bureaucracy, there are solutions to these problems. Recession or not, there is money that can be redirected into the right avenues to get more physicians and psychiatrists into VA hospitals to accommodate the large number of veterans who are seeking health care. Health care, be it mental health care or physical health care, is not something that people can elect to go without. Health care is not something that people should be asked to go without. If it takes a bump in taxes or a redistribution of some budget then we all should be prepared to accept that change.

Remember that as Americans, we are all entitled to the pursuit of happiness whatever that may be, especially those of us who are putting their lives on the line to protect those ideals.